After discovering the flaw in WhatsApp, Rob Heaton - who has made similar security-related findings in the past - exploited the flaw by creating a Chrome extension with a minimal four lines of code, Digital Trends reported late on Tuesday.IANS San Francisco | Posted : Oct 11 2017 12:21PM | Updated: Oct 11 2017 12:26PM

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Your Whatsapp online status can help hackers figure out who you are talking to and when you go to sleep owing to a flaw in the micro-blogging platform, a software engineer has claimed.

After discovering the flaw in WhatsApp, Rob Heaton -- who has made similar security-related findings in the past -- exploited the flaw by creating a Chrome extension with a minimal four lines of code, Digital Trends reported late on Tuesday.

"What that means is that when you go offline and then come back online to read a message, that action is being logged.

"Those online and offline actions from both participants in the conversation can then be correlated to identify when two people are messaging each other," the report added.

Heaton warned that this data can be easily collected on a mass level and then sold to third-party firms for advertising purposes.